cilia, because,
for one thing, she says it very charmingly, and for another, she is
still a very beautiful woman. She is too fond, perhaps, of extinguishing
her beauty under a large mushroom hat, and is given to bending too much
over herbaceous borders, and so hiding her beautiful face. But I dare
say the flowers love to look at it, and to see mirrored in it their own
loveliness.

Aunt Cecilia wears a bonnet sometimes, and thereby hangs a tale. So few
aunts wear a bonnet nowadays that the fact of one doing so is almost
worth chronicling. She doesn't wear it very often, only at the
christenings of the head gardener's babies. From a christening point of
view that is very often, but from a bonnet point of view I suppose it
might be called seldom--once a year? I know that bonnet well, because it
has been sent to me often for renovation. On one particular occasion
it arrived in a cardboard box. On the top of the bonnet was a bunch of
flowers, beautiful enough to make any bonnet accompanying it welcome, in
whatever state of dilapidation. Aunt Cecilia has a knack of sending
just the right sort of flowers, and they always bring a message, which
everybody's flowers don't do.

The bonnet I renovated to the best of my ability and sent it back. In
the course of a few days I received a slightly agitated note from Aunt
Cecilia. "It doesn't suit me, dearest, and after all the trouble you
have taken!"

Knowing Aunt Cecilia, I wrote back, "Did you try it on in bed with your
hair down?"

She answered by return, "Dearest, I did! It really suits me very well
now that I have tried it on in my right mind. I am going to wear it
at the last little Shrub's christening, this afternoon. It is just in
time."

When David and Diana were singled out by night for the particular
attention of a burglar, Aunt Cecilia wrote to sympathize and said, "I am
so thankful, dearest, David did not meet the poor, misguided man!"

May we all be judged as tenderly!

This is a digression, but it perhaps explains Pauline and Pauline's
wedding, and the joy with which all the people in the village entered
into it.

The strangest people kept on arriving the morning of the wedding. It was
verily a gathering of the halt, the lame, and the blind--all friends of
Pauline's. Whenever Uncle Jim was particularly overcome, it was sure to
mean that some old soldier, officer or otherwise, had turned up, who had
served with him in some part of the world, long before Paulin